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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Toshihide Takai, Tomohiro Furukawa, Hidemasa Yamano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1164-1174
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1607136
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes evaluation results of thermophysical properties of stainless steel (SS) containing 5 mass % boron carbide (B4C) in its solid phase. First, the authors synthesized SS-B4C samples with emphasis on 5 mass % B4C and SS using a hot press method and then evaluated its homogeneity in several ways, such as chemical composition analysis, metallographic structure observation, and micro X-ray diffraction. This study also evaluated the density and the specific heat and thermal conductivity of the SS-B4C sample and found that the density becomes lower and the temperature dependence of the density decreased as the temperature rose compared to that of stainless steel Type 316L (SS316L) used as a reactor material. The specific heat became slightly higher than that of SS316L and showed similar temperature dependence up to 1073 K. Unexpectedly, the thermal conductivity became lower than that of SS316L and showed similar temperature dependence up to 1273 K.
